Moscow has said it will be forced to strengthen its defences in the Baltic if Finland and Sweden join Nato, including by deploying nuclear weapons, as the war in Ukraine entered its seventh week and the country braced for a major attack in the east.<\/p>\n
However, the Lithuanian defence minister, Arvydas Anu\u0161auskas, claimed on Thursday that Russia already had nuclear weapons stored in its Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Lithuania and Poland. That claim has not been independently verified, but the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reported in 2018 that nuclear weapon storage bunkers in Kaliningrad had been upgraded.<\/p>\n
The Russian former president Dmitry Medvedev, a senior member of Russia\u2019s security council, said on Thursday that all its forces in the region would be bolstered if the two Nordic countries joined the US-led alliance.<\/p>\n
Medvedev\u2019s threat is the latest of many instances of nuclear sabre-rattling from the Kremlin aimed at deterring western military intervention on behalf of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re obviously very concerned,\u201d said the CIA director, William Burns. \u201cGiven the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they\u2019ve faced so far militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Burns added: \u201cWhile we\u2019ve seen some rhetorical posturing on the part of the Kremlin, moving to higher nuclear alert levels, so far we haven\u2019t seen a lot of practical evidence of the kind of deployments or military dispositions that we would reinforce that concern.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finland and Sweden are deliberating over whether to abandon decades of military non-alignment and join Nato, with the two Nordic countries\u2019 leaders saying Russia\u2019s onslaught on Ukraine has changed Europe\u2019s \u201cwhole security landscape\u201d.<\/p>\n
Their accession to the alliance would more than double Russia\u2019s land border with Nato members, Medvedev said. \u201cNaturally, we will have to reinforce these borders\u201d by bolstering ground, air and naval defences in the region, he said.<\/p>\n Medvedev, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, explicitly raised the nuclear threat, saying Finnish and Swedish Nato membership would mean there could be \u201cno more talk of any nuclear-free status for the Baltic \u2013 the balance must be known.<\/p>\n Russia had \u201cnot taken such measures and was not going to\u201d, he said. \u201cBut if our hand is forced, well \u2026 take note it wasn\u2019t us who proposed this.\u201d<\/p>\n Russia borders the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad is sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, said Moscow would take the security and defence measures that it would deem necessary if Sweden and Finland join Nato, adding that the move would seriously worsen the military situation and lead to \u201cthe most undesirable consequences\u201d.<\/p>\n Anu\u0161auskas described the Russian threat as \u201crather strange\u201d because, he said, nuclear weapons \u201chave always been kept\u201d in Kaliningrad. \u201cThey keep nuclear weapons, delivery vehicles, and have warehouses,\u201d he told the Baltic News Service. \u201cThe international community and countries in the region are perfectly aware of that.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2018 the FAS analysed satellite images and concluded that the Russians had carried out a major renovation of what appeared to be \u201can active nuclear weapons storage site in the Kaliningrad region\u201d. However, the analysts were unable to determine whether nuclear warheads were already being stored there, were imminently about to arrive, or would be moved there in a crisis.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is indeed a storage site in Kaliningrad, known as Kolosovka. That is where nuclear weapons for all units located in Kaliningrad would be,\u201d said Pavel Podvig, a military expert based in Geneva who runs a research projecton Russian nuclear forces. \u201cThere are conflicting reports about whether Russia actually has any weapons in Kolosovka. We don\u2019t really know.\u201d<\/p>\n Hans Kristensen, the director of the nuclear information project at FAS, said work was still going on at the storage bunkers. \u201cThey\u2019re working on security perimeter now. So I doubt there are warheads in there,\u201d Kristensen said.<\/p>\n Finland\u2019s prime minister, Sanna Marin, said on Wednesday that Finland, which shares an 810-mile (1,300km) border with Russia, was likely to decide on a Nato application \u201cwithin weeks\u201d, while her Swedish counterpart, Magdalena Andersson, said there was \u201cno point delaying\u201d the decision.<\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Russian forces who have pulled back from northern Ukraine after failing to take the capital were \u201cincreasing their activities on the southern and eastern fronts, attempting to avenge their defeats\u201d.<\/p>\n The deputy defence minister, Hanna Malyar, said on Thursday that Russia was massing forces along the Russia-Ukraine border, in Belarus and in the breakaway Transdniestria region of Moldova, with the eastern cities of Kharkiv, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia coming under missile attack.<\/p>\n Moldova accused the Russian army of trying to recruit its citizens after British military intelligence said Moscow was attempting to enlist fighters in Transdniestria, a narrow strip of land held by pro-Russia separatists that is within about 25 miles of the Ukrainian port of Odesa.<\/p>\n \u201cSuch actions do not promote peace for all of us, our fellow citizens, for our families. Such things are very dangerous and they must be stopped,\u201d said the Moldovan foreign minister, Nicu Popescu, without giving further details. The Kremlin did not immediately comment.<\/p>\n The chief military development of the day was the loss of Russia\u2019s flagship missile cruiser, Moskva, which sank in \u201cstormy seas\u201dwhile being towed to a port in the Black Sea after an explosion.<\/p>\n The Ukrainian southern military command claimed late on Wednesday to have struck the Moskva with Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles, while distracting its crew with an aerial drone, causing it to start sinking and forcing the crew to abandon ship.<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s defence ministry initially denied reports that it had sunk and claimed the fires had been extinguished. Four Russian ships that had gone to the Moskva\u2019s rescue were being hampered by stormy weather and by ammunition blowing up onboard, it said.<\/p>\n But late on Thursday, the ministry said in a statement: \u201cThe cruiser ship Moskva lost its stability when it was towed to the port because of the damage to the ship\u2019s hull that it received during the fire from the detonation of ammunition. In stormy sea conditions, the ship sank.\u201d The crew had been safely evacuated, but it marks the most significant military loss of a naval vessel since the Argentinian cruiser the General Belgrano was torpedoed by a British submarine in 1982.<\/p>\n Moscow said the port of Mariupol was under its full control, but Vadym Denysenko, an adviser to Ukraine\u2019s interior minister, said on Thursday that the battle over the seaport was \u201cstill ongoing today\u201d.<\/p>\n Mariupol is a key target in Moscow\u2019s push to secure a land corridor between the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Luhansk in Donbas and Crimea, which Russia occupied and annexed in 2014, and its capture would allow the Kremlin\u2019s military planners to redeploy vital resources farther east.<\/p>\n Russian officials accused Ukraine of using helicopters to bomb a town in the southern Bryansk region, about 6 miles from the border, saying seven people were injured in shelling and describing the attack as a \u201cdeliberate strike on residential buildings\u201d. The claim could not be independently verified.<\/p>\n The Russian retreat from around Kyiv has led to the discovery of large numbers of apparently massacred civilians, drawing international condemnation and calls for a war crimes investigation. The Hague-based international criminal court, which deals with rights abuses, said Ukraine had become a \u201ccrime scene\u201d.<\/p>\n The ICC\u2019s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, said on a visit to Bucha, where officials say more than 400 civilians died: \u201cWe\u2019re here because we have reasonable grounds to believe that crimes within the jurisdiction of the court are being committed.\u201d Moscow has rejected all reports of atrocities, which Putin has dismissed as \u201cfakes\u201d. Moscow has said it will be forced to strengthen its defences in the Baltic if Finland and Sweden join Nato, including by deploying nuclear weapons, as the war in Ukraine entered its seventh week and the country braced for a major attack in the east. However, the Lithuanian defence minister, Arvydas Anu\u0161auskas, claimed on Thursday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":20283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[11261,6728,9747,8217,5304,5463,6573,5443,9204,5268,5640,11526,11583,5145,11555,6848,10507,6623,8440,12635,5241,5995,6193,9506,5692,6621,12617,8854,6738,5335,6159,11638,5345,8100,9486,5908,11111,10954,11211,10197,7226,6086,1152,5342,8029,12186,3874,9974,7181,10634,6194,5657,1429,5572,5254,12985,6067,5340,6130,4802,6666,5925,8171,11057,6072,5396,837,11082,3805,6242,3174,71,5462,3457,5217,3852,6454,9205,9162,5655,5752,6808,5250,5818,9818,1378,9209,11906,5180,6885,5555,6348,8385,10786,8033,694,6886,5251,5761,5472,5724,9085,3954,5931,10415,594,8280,6874],"class_list":["post-20282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news","tag-accused","tag-alliance","tag-ammunition","tag-army","tag-attack","tag-belarus","tag-black","tag-bomb","tag-border","tag-british","tag-bucha","tag-burns","tag-capital","tag-cia","tag-citizens","tag-civilians","tag-court","tag-crimea","tag-crisis","tag-delivery","tag-died","tag-donbas","tag-donetsk","tag-drone","tag-estonia","tag-europe","tag-evacuated","tag-explosion","tag-families","tag-finland","tag-fire","tag-forced","tag-foreign-minister","tag-hague","tag-horror","tag-icc","tag-injured","tag-international","tag-international-criminal-court","tag-investigation","tag-kaliningrad","tag-kharkiv","tag-kremlin","tag-kyiv","tag-land","tag-latvia","tag-lead","tag-leadership","tag-lithuania","tag-lost","tag-luhansk","tag-mariupol","tag-medvedev","tag-military","tag-missile","tag-missiles","tag-moldova","tag-moscow","tag-moskva","tag-nato","tag-nuclear","tag-nuclear-power","tag-nuclear-weapon","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-odesa","tag-peace","tag-poland","tag-port","tag-president","tag-president-putin","tag-prime-minister","tag-putin","tag-residential","tag-russia","tag-russian","tag-russians","tag-sanna-marin","tag-satellite","tag-scientists","tag-security","tag-security-council","tag-shares","tag-ship","tag-strike","tag-submarine","tag-sweden","tag-swedish","tag-the-general","tag-ukraine","tag-ukraines-president","tag-ukrainian","tag-us","tag-verified","tag-vessel","tag-video","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-volodymyr-zelenskiy","tag-war","tag-war-crimes","tag-warehouses","tag-weapons","tag-weather","tag-will","tag-william-burns","tag-work","tag-who","tag-zaporizhzhia","tag-zelenskiy"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nsource:the guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"